Q ‘n A Saturday: Vision Ears

Welcome to Linus’ new interview series on Headfonia.com! Every two weeks we will publish an interview with an insider of the audio industry. They will give us a little insight on how they started and what they are up to. We are thrilled to be able to share a little something with all of you.

This week we are lucky to have Vision Ears‘ founders Amin Karimpour and Marcel Schönen!

Marcel Schönen

Amin Karimpour

HFN: Please tell us a bit about yourself and your role at Vision Ears.MS: I am co-owner of Vision Ears and I´m responsible for general business, quality control in production, developing new products and I´m still doing some repairs. So I´m still quite close to the production to make sure we keep the high quality level. From 1997 until 2007 I was guitar player and singer of a metal band called SUIDAKRA and we were (and they are still) very successful and during my time we were touring through Europe and playing a lot of Festivals like the Wacken Open Air.

HFN: When was Vision Ears founded?MS: I started working with In-Ears in 2000 as an employee for a German brand who was leading the market for custom In-Ears and earprotection in Germany at this time. After 7 years I quit and founded Compact Monitors together with another engineer and former colleague. This company had only little success and due to some differences between me and my business partner, we decided to split and in January 2013 Vision Ears was founded by me and Amin.

HFN: Who are the people behind Vision Ears and what are their backgrounds?MS: Amin and I are educated salesmen. The team of Vision Ears are at the moment 12 people and they are educated dental technicians, sound technicians, metal workers and people from other branches who we trained and who have a talent for precision. We´re very thankful to have such a great team and our high quality is not at least their achievement.

HFN: What is driving Vision Ears?AK: For us it‘s always quality first. In terms of our products and also in terms of customer service. On the other hand we‘re driven by passion. We love this product, because it gives us so many possibilities to combine materials, develop new things and improve standards. And the most appreciation of our work is to get a customers feedback which is showing us that all our passion and focus on details is appreciated and high valued. Our customers spend much time with designing their very own custom In-Ear, it´s very individual and we simply share this passion when we build it. And to show them that we care even after the sale, we welcome them to our VE family which means we still care for them if there is maybe a complaint, individual wishes or simple service requests. We put a lot of attention to our customer service.

HFN: What was it that got you into personal audio?AK: Actually this market started for us in 2010 when we got several requests from asian dealers who wanted to sell our products. Before this, we were not aware of the great potential of this market because in Germany custom In-Ears were only used by musicians. And even today the personal audio market in Germany is rather small compared to some Asian countries. In the meantime we fell in love to the personal audio market because audiophiles feel a little bit more passion about our products compared to musicians who buy an In-Ear only as a tool for using it on stage. And when we visit Asia for a show it´s always huge fun because our customers, dealers, business partners and also some competitors are such great people we really love to share our time with.

A daytime code monkey with a passion for audio and his kids, Linus tends to look at gear with a technical approach, trying to understand why certain things sound the way they do. When there is no music around, Linus goes the extra mile and annoys the hell out of his colleagues with low level beatboxing.